The Last One At The Party by Bethany Clift

THE END OF EVERYTHING WAS HER BEGINNING

It's December 2023 and the world as we know it has ended.

The human race has been wiped out by a virus called 6DM ('Six Days Maximum' - the longest you've got before your body destroys itself).

But somehow, in London, one woman is still alive. A woman who has spent her whole life compromising what she wants, hiding how she feels and desperately trying to fit in. A woman who is entirely unprepared to face a future on her own.

Now, with only an abandoned golden retriever for company, she must travel through burning cities, avoiding rotting corpses and ravenous rats on a final journey to discover if she really is the last surviving person on earth.

And with no one else to live for, who will she become now that she's completely alone?

I received a copy of this from the publisher Hodder and Staughton, and Netgalley in return for an honest review.

I wasn’t too sure about picking this one up, I mean a story about a global pandemic where everyone is dying? Right now?  But you know, I’m glad I did. Living in todays times with the Covid-19 pandemic going on, it might seem strange to read a book about a similar thing, but it was very different. Bethany explains at the start of the book why she wrote this story, and how she wrote it years before Covid was here. She was doing her second edits of the book when Covid started to appear, so she went back in the edits and put things in about Covid and how 6DM was so different to Covid-19. 

The book is told from one point of view, and that is ‘her’. I say her as you never find out her name. This added something different to the story, maybe it’s what helped it be ok for me to read right now. The book is about what it says on the cover, she is the last one at the party. Everyone is dying from 6DM, and they are dying quick, 7 days roughly if I recollect correctly. We follow her as she travels and tries to find life, and she takes us back to certain points in her life before. 

She moves around and lives in fancy hotels, visits some big houses and does plenty of ‘shopping’. I mean wouldn’t you want to sit in a little apartment when you had the run of the country would you! She literally has herself a party, until she realises she needs to go looking for people. 

There are some pretty sad moments, which is to be expected in a story like this. But there were also some uplifting moments. But birds... man are they freaky!!!

I know you may feel like I did about picking this book up right now, but it was nothing like it expected. The story was good, it made me cry, it made me laugh, it made me sad and it made me happy. Read it, I guarantee you won’t be disappointed.

Stay safe folks